The present invention relates to a translating apparatus which is capable of generating a natural translated sentence.
In known translating apparatuses, a source language inputted from a keyboard is inputted to a translation module by control of a main CPU. The inputted source language is translated into a target language by the translation module through utilization of a dictionary, grammatical rules and tree structure conversion rules stored in a memory. At this time, a prefix present in the source language is translated by using its single translated word contained in the above mentioned dictionary. Meanwhile, when a translated sentence of the source language, including a word composed of the prefix, and a basic word to be combined with the prefix is outputted, a translated word of the prefix and a translated word of the basic word are outputted successively.
As described above, in the known translating apparatuses, the prefix present in the source language is translated by using the single translated word contained in the dictionary. Therefore, in the case where the dictionary contains, for example, only a Chinese character ("kanji" in Japanese) " " as a translated word of a prefix "super-", an inputted word "supercomputer" in the source language is translated into an unnatural Japanese word " " which is not in common use as shown in FIG. 1. This unnaturalness of the translated word " " is caused by the fact that the translated word " " is constituted by combination of the Chinese character " " and square Japanese letters ("katakana" in Japanese) " " in contrast with a natural translated word " " which is wholly composed of square Japanese letters.
Meanwhile, in a case where an ordinary word whose translated word is registered in the dictionary is translated, the obtained translated word does not become as unnatural if the registered translated word is proper. However, when the basic language combined with the prefix is translated, such a case may happen in which combination of the translated word of the prefix and the translated word of the basic word is not natural even if a proper translated word of the prefix is registered in the dictionary. Thus, when the translated sentence is checked, it is necessary to carefully check especially the translated word of the basic word combined with the prefix.
However, in known translating apparatuses, when the translated word of the basic word combined with the prefix is outputted, the translated word of the prefix and the translated word of the basic word ar outputted merely successively. Hence, it is not clear whether the translated word " " is obtained by looking up the single inputted word "supercomputer" in the dictionary or by looking up the basic word "computer" in the dictionary and processing of the prefix "super-", thereby resulting in inconvenient checkup of the translated sentence.